Read on to discover the background textures that will play an indispensable role in your everyday design process...

1. The Concrete Background Texture

Looking to give your designs an instant cool edge? Concrete textures can look grungy and distressed, or minimal and urban—take your pick from this selection of concrete backgrounds to find the perfect partner for your designs.

Designing a website for a new retail brand? Putting together a promo flyer for a design event? Consider integrating a concrete texture* into your artwork, and make your media seem on-trend in an instant.

Check out this vector background pack for example. This pack comes with 40 background textures featuring concrete, stone, and so much more. Add some grit to your designs with a few simple clicks.

*Top Tip: Concrete can appear cold in the wrong context—warm up your design by pairing the texture with a warmer metallic tone, like copper.

2. The Space Background Texture

We all wanted to be an astronaut at some point in our childhood (or, indeed, adulthood), but you can bring a touch of celestial wonder to your designs without leaving Earth.

Scenic space backgrounds might not be the plainest of backgrounds, but they are surprisingly versatile. They look fantastic layered behind poster artwork, and can help to create a more immersive online experience when placed as a background skin on a homepage.

Space backgrounds have an instant psychological effect on the viewer—they can inspire feelings of adventure and intellectualism (perfect for science media or business pitch documents), but they can also be calming and spiritual. Their stunning beauty requires only simple typography in the foreground to make them shine.

Check out this selection of space backgrounds, which has a huge range of different color tones to suit any project. Add them to your posters or websites for a sublime space effect.

3. The Grunge Background Texture

Grunge backgrounds and grunge textures will never go out of style—they always give a cool, edgy look to designs. Look for peeled paint textures, faded edges, and gritty color schemes.

Grunge backgrounds and textures look great because they contain so much detail and visual interest. They are versatile too—try layering them under photos and setting the opacity to multiply to bring through some of that interesting texture and give your images an aged, vintage-style effect.

Try adding a grunge background to a festival flyer, a gig poster or a magazine cover to add depth and interest. These unique grunge backgrounds will also look fantastic placed in games and apps, bringing a more immersive quality to digital designs.

Enjoy a premium selection of 12 painted backgrounds featuring beautiful colors and more. Created with a variety of tools, this set has high resolution backgrounds you'll definitely want to add to your collection.

4. The Polygon Background Texture

Polygons might not seem like the most exciting building block for a background, but the final effect is incredibly versatile and professional-looking.

Polygon textures have a tech-forward style that suits corporate media, like reports, business websites or expo displays.

They are a great way to add polished texture quickly, which is a great timesaver for corporate pitches. They also have a very modern, even futuristic quality that helps businesses to look forward-thinking.

If you’re looking to add texture to apps, polygon designs are perfectly suited for the job—they’re stylish without being obtrusive, and they balance flat and 3D styles to keep your designs looking on-trend.

5. The Blackboard Background Texture

Blackboard backgrounds will be a real workhorse for your design projects. Set behind simple or cursive typography, they’re great for emphasizing points in sales pitches, on educational materials, or on motivational posters or flyers.

Team a blackboard texture with a handwritten or, even better, chalkboard typeface for the ultimate back-to-school pairing. This will work just as well on college lecture slides as it will for advertising early Fall sales with a back-to-school theme.

Blackboard backgrounds don’t need to be black either! Liven up a conventional blackboard texture with chalky, muted shades, as in this blackboard image collection.

6. The Watercolor Background Texture

Want to add a painterly, artistic touch to your designs? Watercolor backgrounds and painterly textures are perfect for bringing a craft-inspired look to your designs, without needing to pick up a paintbrush.

Watercolor textures aren’t just suited to advertising art sales or craft fairs—because they represent something that is hand-crafted, they are perfectly suited to branding and packaging for organic products or independent businesses.

Try integrating them into cosmetics or jewellery box designs to add a home-made, authentic touch to packaging designs.

Watercolor textures can bring a very different character to your layouts when set in different colorways. In this watercolor texture collection, a clear turquoise blue has a summer holiday vibe (great for hotel flyers or websites); a bright red gives has a bold graffiti feel, and an olive green, navy blue and black blend has a natural style, which would also swing towards a grungy look if darkened.

This watercolor texture pack contains 10 high quality backgrounds with gorgeous colors. Use it to add beautiful texture to your posters or stationery.

Suited to all sorts of media, bokeh textures are great for softening layouts, helping to add a beautiful, soft-focus style to websites, magazines, book covers—you name it.

Bokeh backgrounds are also perfect for fashion catalogues, wedding stationery, or for simply showcasing beautiful photos or typography.

Keep a collection of bokeh backgrounds on hand for when a client wants to tone down a design or make it appear more soft and calming. This bokeh backgrounds pack features 10 high resolution images perfect for any website or app.

For vintage-inspired and flat-style designs, a paper background is indispensable—see your designs magically transform from crisp and contemporary to suitably aged in an instant.

Even if you’re intending to print your items on paper or card, adding a ‘fake’ paper background will only add to the tactile feel of your finished item. It’s also a great trick for making a printed item feel more luxurious if your budget won’t stretch to printing on expensive paper.

This broad range of brick textures has styles to suit every taste, from clean burnt terracotta to distressed painted walls. Download 20 different textures for the perfect brick background for your designs. Also included is a quick vignette layer for a dramatic effect.